The Fitz Bar & Lounge in Fort Lauderdale has put up on a back wall some of my photos of the city and Saturday hosted a reception. At one point, someone asked me if I was thinking of other venues for exhibits, perhaps a museum. I told him I wasn’t, for the simple reason that I’m not a professional; taking pictures for me is simply a hobby. It would be, I thought later, like someone who just writes blogs getting a book deal with a major publisher. Then it occurred to me that, these days, that happens fairly frequently.
The other week I stopped by my dentist’s office to pick up my mouth guard. I’ve been going to Dr. Moraitis for 37 years and I would say the place reminds me of my childhood dentist’s office except that I dreaded going to my childhood dentist’s office.
Cheryl the receptionist handed me the new guard, told me a bill would be coming and then, as I headed to the door, said, “Happy grinding.”
Saturday afternoon we drove to the AMC theater in the Coral Ridge Mall to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 and found that the 2 o’clock showing was sold out. (We generally catch movies at Savor, where we’re sometimes the only patrons.) We got back in the car and headed up Federal to Big Apple Books, which was busy with customers. Within the space of 30 minutes we discovered the fallacy behind two widely held assumptions: That people no longer go to the movies and people no longer read books.
The hostess stand at S3 was strung with cutouts of soccer jerseys bearing the names and colors of numerous countries, including Poland.
“Poland didn’t make the World Cup,” Hania told the manager.
He gave a shrug and said, “We tried.”
“So did we,” said Hania.
David Hockney, who died last week at the age of 89, was a brilliant artist and also a frequent wearer, particularly in his younger years, of Rooster ties. He preferred thick knit ones with thin stripes, which he often wore with striped shirts, giving his torso a colorfully clashing horizontal-vertical aspect. It’s hard to pull off – and believe me, I’ve tried.
James Delingpole, remembering his father in a recent issue of The Spectator, wrote: “He had the gift of both being very interested in other people’s lives and being peculiarly interesting himself.”